Posted
by
Roblimoon Monday January 06, 2014 @05:51PM
from the paper-games-never-quite-went-away dept.

Emmett has a good rep as a video game music composer, and he's worked on a number of Star Trek-related projects, including the recently-released audio book, How to Speak Klingon: Essential Phrases for the Intergalactic Traveler. Emmett freely admits that he has no experience with RPG games. The closest he's come was running a major D&D meetup some years back. But he has experience and contacts developed from many years working online not only within the Star Trek community but (years ago) on Slashdot and as editor for Linux.com. And, he says, when he was a teenager he ran comic book stores. So is Emmett suited to run an RPG company? Possibly. He's actively looking for games to publish. Sales aren't going to start for six months or so, so there is no website for Arrakeen Tactical quite yet. Until there is one, you can contact Emmett about his game venture by emailing angelaATclockworkjetpack.com.

Tim
Lord: So, Emmett, you’ve had over the... I guess 15 or so
years that you and I have known each other... you’ve had a
number of jobs and right now

Emmett
Plant: Yeah.

Tim
Lord: Today I want to talk to you about your foray into the world
of RPGs.

Emmett
Plant: Okay.

Tim
Lord: But first what is your day job now. What do you tell people
who say what do you do?

Emmett
Plant: Usually I tell them that I work on Star Trek which I do,
which is kind of – that’s something people recognize. I
am also a systems engineer and an automation engineer. So it’s
hard for my mom to understand what automation engineer is, such as it
is with so many other people. So I say, well I work on Start Trek but
I am also a tech dork. So I write music for video games and I work on
Star Trek. I produce Star Trek audio books and How to Speak Klingon
available in stores now from Chronicle Books.

Tim
Lord: And you’re writing games for – writing music
for video games rather?

Emmett
Plant: Yeah.

Tim
Lord: What part of your life is that, how much time does that
occupy?

Emmett
Plant: It’s interesting because the business side of that
is you know the money side of that comes from royalties, from stuff
I’ve done long time ago. So building up the number of games
I’ve done music for is actually been more important than the
amount of time I spend on it. Generally I get to play with
synthesizers and filters and toys and sound and shaping materials and
just dorking out on the real and music is the end result of that and
my clients want that.

So I kind
of need to do music to balance other stuff I am doing in my life,
because I get really bored really easily. So I have to manage that.
So, generally I know that if I write a piece of music I am going to
be able to sell it at some point.

Tim
Lord: And what you are getting into now with RPGs, no music
involved, all paper?

Emmett
Plant: No, but interestingly enough I wrote an album called Honor
Bound which is a bunch of Klingon themed music. And people play it,
when they have D&D night at their house. I was like okay, may be
it does, I don’t know, I probably won’t put out any music
specifically for this though.

Tim
Lord: Now how crazy or not crazy is it to get into the field of
making paper based, turn based, role playing games in the era of iPod
and iPad and computer games in general, who is playing paper games?

Emmett
Plant: A lot of people and also I think who is getting into that,
I think drunk people; people with substance abuse problems, people
unloved by their parents and desperately trying to do something with
their lives that they can justify as worthwhile.

Tim
Lord: That’s a pretty big demographic?

Emmett
Plant: It is and those people are all wrong, because role playing
games will not help them do that. But, no, it’s interesting
because we’ve seen role playing games go from inexpensive
endeavor like D&D games back in the day where you could roll up
your own characters and create your adventures and now it is a
product, Dungeons & Dragons is a big behemoth of a product. There
are miniatures, there are books, there are toys, there are games,
there are obvious little pieces and now they are produced at a much
higher level than they ever have been before, which is cool because
you know the money is there, people are going to buy those products.
But people still play, they play D&D at PAX every year; they plat
D&D at comic book stores constantly.

Tim
Lord: What does it take to get into the business as a new player,
like that is to say as a new maker of games, you as a player in the
industry?

Emmett
Plant: Right.

Tim
Lord: What does that mean, I understand that you have bought an
existing corpus or games

Emmett
Plant: Right. I found actually most of the independent stuff
that’s coming out is from one guy who does his own art and his
own layout and his own story. And a lot of times you’ll find a
writer who is very, very good at kind of attention to detail that you
really enjoy both as a reader and a player. But you’ll find
that may be the art is clip art or it’s not as good as it could
be or the layout is not as good as it could be, so it’s kind of
watching a show where you love the actor playing the main star but
nothing about the show is interesting to you.

This
happens a lot just watching TV, but the same is true of independent
games. So I am trying to go out and find the writers I like, doing
the things that I like to play and then building an army of people
behind them, giving their work to a layout artist and a digital
artist and layout people and letting them really build this game into
what it should be for people who want to play.

Tim
Lord: So, you’re cultivating rather than necessarily only
making complete games in-house?

Emmett
Plant: Right. And I know there is, I mean, we’ve already
bought the first original game that we’re going to be
releasing. So it’s column A, column B. Some stuff we’re
buying because we like the author, some stuff we’re buying
because we like the writer and we want him to write something new for
us. So I’m always in the lookout for new stuff to purchase and
writers that I enjoy who want to try this out, to see what’s
up.

Tim
Lord: Now this is a new field for you, is that right?

Emmett
Plant: It is. Yeah. I’ve got zero experience in RPGs. At
one point, I ran the third largest D&D meet up in the country,
nobody knows me from that and it’s not as though, oh, well,
this guy who works on Star Trek is starting a game company, therefore
it’s going to be a success. No, it doesn’t work that way.
Any ____6:01 I have won’t transfer over. It’s not
going to turn into sales. What’s going to turn into sales are
when we put out cool games that people like and they buy them or they
hear about them in one way or another and they come back to us and
say, “Well, what else have you got?” And then if they
find more games they like by more writers they like, then they’ll
keep buying more stuff.

Tim Lord: Why
don’t you talk about distribution? Because with electronic
games nowadays much of it is instant download, people still buy some
games in shops.

Emmett Plant: It’s
true.

Tim Lord: How does
it work for RPGs and what do you picture for the ones that you would
like to release?

Emmett Plant:
Unfortunately, we don’t have that GameStop mode. People
taking this pay per game that they have purchased as PDFs and taking
them to GameStop and have them, I don’t know, pulped into other
books, there is no used market there, but it’s all going to be
watermarked PDFs. It’s essentially copy protection. I mean,
literal copy protection like a Xerox machine. That doesn’t
really interest me as much as the distribution venue in terms of here
is a way you can get the stuff we have made on the cheaps. That’s
a lot more interesting to me than tracking how many copies have been
sold or have been copied from other people and whatnot.

If you find one of our
games and you find like a PDF lying out, the name of the person who
bought it is going to be sitting there and you should try and get it
back to them. But please, by all means, you should read it, see
what’s going on. I don’t think there is anything good to
be had from the watermarking, but there is a lot of good that could
be had from the PDF side of – this is a format that people
understand and can use.

Tim Lord: So you
are not terribly worried of someone ends up playing your game without
ringing the till?

Emmett Plant: Without
express written permission of the company, no, that doesn’t
bother me. Like I’ve – that would be crazy because all
the music I’ve ever bought, I bought because at one point
someone handed me a cassette with that band on it, and I’ve
spent probably hundreds of dollars with the Talking Heads at this
point and I was exposed to them on a mixed tape. So, maybe that’ll
happen with my company if people really like what we are doing. That
will be awesome. That will be great. But really, I don’t even
try to think about the business side of it all. It’s just,
let’s do something cool and let’s do something fun. And
if we’re all having fun doing it, people are going to have fun
playing it and then it’s just good.

Tim Lord: Can you
give us some hints about what kind of games more specifically besides
being RPGs? Now, what sort of roles, what kind of players do you
expect?

Emmett Plant: I
think we’re probably going to have – people talk about
the filthy casual players of games is that if you never played
role-playing games for the past 20 years, then you are not coming to
the table with the experience necessarily we need. I think that’s
bullshit. Like I think that’s rough. And I think that pushes
people away who would otherwise really enjoy what we are doing.

One of the problems I
have is when I was a teenager, I ran comic book stores, which I guess
is not surprising to anyone ever, but my favorite comic store
locally, they have a D&D night. And it’s six people and
they’re playing an adventure where they have been working this
adventure for the past few months. If you go to the comic book store
on that night, you cannot join that game. It’s basically just a
place for that particular group to play without dirtying up someone’s
living room.

I’m fine with that
if the six people that come in there and play regularly ring the till
and go to the people who run the store and buy all their dice through
them, buy all their materials through them. That’s the way that
should work. I think in a lot of cases that’s not what happens.
It just turns out to be like “Well, comic book store said we
can do it here, so we’re going to do it here.” It’s
like “No, you have to support the businesses that are helping
you get your fun on.”

In that scenario, I would
much rather get screwed than you screw your comic book store owner or
manager. If any comic book store needs one of our games – this
is my mother again, Slashdot, it’s going to be a problem. It
is. Hi mom, I’m being interviewed. This is really bad. Bye.

Tim Lord: We’ll
make sure that gets edited out.

Emmett Plant: Oh,
one would hope. No question where we are at.

Tim Lord: That’s
fine. That was actually – you were at kind of a conclusion
there. But I do want to ask about the name of your company. So, tell
us about the name of your company?

Emmett Plant: Well,
the name of my company is Clockwork Jetpack, but the name of the RPG
company is a subsidiary of that and it’s called Arrakeen
Tactical because I’m the huge fan of Dune, and I now live in
Arizona and most of the people who work for this company, both
employees and contractors, live out here in the desert. So I thought,
well, let’s name a game company after something in Dune, the
capital city of Arrakis, which I imagine got blown up.

Tim Lord: Still
needs people, so what are some of the roles that it really takes
months to go even with somewhat of the staple games that they
purchased already?

Emmett Plant: Yeah,
well, you can’t just magically assume something is going to
happen, people need to do work and for that they need to be paid. So
you have to get those people onboard, and make sure that they have
what they need to get the job done. I don’t actually have the
time to run this company in day-to-day operations, and I won’t
be. There are people that have been working for Clockwork Jetpack for
a while that have been amazing and looking for a chance to do
something new and fun, and when I bought this up to them, they’re
like, yeah, I think it’d be fun to run the game company.

So I was like, okay,
well, let’s do it. So I’m going to make the final
business decisions and my name is going to be on everything, but I’ve
got to trust my people at this point and they’re great. If more
people learn about the folks that work for me, so much the better,
it’s going to be good for them and I think my team is really
excited about bringing more fun to people, especially fun that
doesn’t have to break the pack. I mean, I think our average
cost of one of these games is going to cost maybe a couple, three
bucks, we’re not talking anything crazy. So cheap thrills are
still thrills, so

Tim Lord: One more
question I want to ask is, given that there are a lot of people in
the world who have ideas for games?

Emmett Plant: Yeah.

Tim Lord: More
than your or any other company in the world is going to put out, what
should they do? How do you get from an idea in your head, what steps
would you suggest if somebody thinks they have a game that could be
worth publishing?

Emmett Plant: I
think the first thing they should do is save some money because
typically the market rates for what people are paid for working in
this market are terrible. I mean they are often lower than original
science fiction writing which is hysterically low, given time. I
would encourage people to focus on what they’re good at and
then try to find the things that they’re bad at, and either
learn to try to do them themselves and do them well or just gathering
up their cash and finding good artists, and finding good play testers
who give you valuable feedback and not just people who eat your
pizza.

Realistically though, all
of my answers on this are going to be bullshit because I don’t
know anything about bringing the game or game material to market. I’m
really new with this. And like most of my other businesses, even the
ones that are profitable, I have failed a million times, like that
doesn’t bother me at all. It’s what you learn from that
process, I think we’re going to fail a few times. I think we’re
going to step on our own dress and then it comes off at the
dramatically appropriate point.

Tim Lord: Do you
review where you are at with a given endeavor every 6, 9, 12 months?

Emmett Plant: One
thing I like to do is ask people what I’m doing wrong and the
people that work for me know that, “I think you’re doing
great,” is not an acceptable answer. I mean, working for
Slashdot once upon a time, at first you’re annoyed at the
people telling you that you’re doing everything wrong and then
if you cannot be a douchebag for a while, and think about what people
are saying, you can usually get some valuable feedback.

We’re going to
stumble and crawl sometimes and nothing is going to be perfect. We’re
going to probably blow some money on stuff that we didn’t need
to blow money on. We’re probably going to overpay some people,
but we’re going to underpay other people, but it’s almost
a Toyota/Kaizen thing, it’s continuous improvement, it’s
like just be aware that you might be screwing up everything.

So try to build your
[true jail] of framing from a systems point of view, build that
sandbox and then make it so that when you blow something up, it
doesn’t take everything else with it. So try and
compartmentalize what you can and then you can kind of take a running
jump and if you do well, then it’s awesome and if you do badly,
well, you’re going to be – you need to come back up to
speed in a little bit, but it’s a little bit, it’s not
like you’ll never do this again, because you’ve blown all
your money and that’s the end of it.

Tim Lord: The
experience is accumulative.

Emmett Plant: Right,
right. So I honestly don’t know what people should do, but if
they have a cool game they should probably try and call me or
something or call one of my people. But yeah, we’re going to
get stuff wrong. But I think that’s probably a good point of
view rather than this thing that we’re going to do is going to
change the world, like I think that maybe works only if you are Steve Jobs,
and I am out of turtlenecks.

He is not. I see no mention of any business experience. Working in a comic book store clerk as a teen doesn't count. In running an RPG company, the emphasis is on "running" and "company". Just like every alcoholic dreams of owning a bar, every gamer and comic book nerd dreams of opening their own game or comic store. Just about every one is disastrously unqualified. If you've never worked in a responsible position on the business side of the game industry you have no idea what you're getting in to.

I read the summary three times in disbelief that it is actually on the front page. Every so often something pops on on Slashdot's front page that doesn't belong, sometimes it really bad. This. takes. the. cake.

It reads like a quickly drafted, brief email where one associate is casually bouncing something off another, or even a scam email. We are not here to do market research for someone that can't do it themselves. Is this a personal favor for someone, Roblimo? Please don't abuse Slashdot like this in the future.